Taking Action

“Vantage Point,” “The Counterfeiters,” and “Definitely, Maybe.”

Forest Whitaker and Dennis Quaid in a thriller shown from several points of view.Credit ROBERT RISKO

One of the things that moviemakers dream of is the excitement of capturing the sheer flux of life, the interaction of many motions, large and small—say, a mass of people surging forward (in war, revolution, or just getting to work), and, within that mass, the movements of a few individuals (lovers, murderers, executives late for an appointment). So here’s a complex sequence of events, featuring as much flux as any director could desire: the President of the United States is giving a speech in a public square in Salamanca, Spain; an assassin plugs him from a window across the square; a bomb goes off underneath the speaker’s platform; men and women, all with some mysterious intent of their own, barrel through the general confusion, while panicked people by the hundreds stream into the surrounding streets, among them terrorists and American Secret Service agents racing after them. Now, considered merely as story material, “Vantage Point”—a new thriller that records all this—is sub-Tom Clancy stuff. The terrorist plot at the center of the movie is not even marginally plausible; the characters are stick figures—either loyal and brave defenders of the President or swinish, swarthy bad guys. Considered as a piece of storytelling, however, “Vantage Point” is something remarkable—the ultimate case, perhaps, of a movie as a big whirling machine. The writer, Barry L. Levy, and the director, Pete Travis, a Brit who made a TV movie about a bombing in Northern Ireland, may be taking their cues from genre fiction, but no one can say that they haven’t beautifully mapped out their turf as a grid of charged vectors.

To get everything in, the filmmakers use a theme-and-variations structure. We see the events, from beginning to end, six times, first from the point of view of a TV-news crew reporting the speech, and then through the eyes of a Secret Service agent (Dennis Quaid), a tourist who gets mixed up in the mess (Forest Whitaker), the President (William Hurt), two of the terrorists (Saïd Taghmaoui and Edgar Ramirez), and so on. The movie is intended as an homage to Kurosawa’s “Rashomon,” but, really, it’s quite different. In “Rashomon,” the varying accounts of a rape and murder are shaped by self-interest. “Vantage Point” is more literal; it shows what each person actually sees, not what he wants to see. In each depiction, we get a little closer to comprehension of the entire affair only to have the film-makers—in a rather cheap trick—cut away to still another character’s restricted view of things. Finally, they abandon the vantage-point experiment, shift to an impersonal view, and finish the story in a conventional way. Like so many other thrillers, this one ends in a series of car crashes and shootouts.

Is it art? Not remotely. But, up to the final scenes, it’s a tremendous piece of engineering. After all, the narratives have to synch up visually, which can’t be easy to manage. And the hurtling force of “Vantage Point” is fun to watch. But something more than excitement is at stake. Like mystics or ancient philosophers, we long to perceive the secret and idiosyncratic pattern within chaos, the singular currents running through the tumultuous sea. We are denied this in life, since we can never recall everything in an event happening around us, no matter how many times we replay it in our heads. Levy and Travis, though, have pulled this off. They inject some small human touches into the action—Dennis Quaid’s frowning determination, Forest Whitaker’s natural empathy, William Hurt’s self-amusement mixed with gravity—but all that feels like decoration. The soul of this new machine is the machine itself.

Who is the greater hero: the morally intransigent man who refuses all compromise with evil, or the trimmer who partly collaborates with an oppressor in the hope of keeping himself and others alive? These are hardly the freshest questions in the world, but “The Counterfeiters,” which was written and directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky—whose Austrian grandparents were Nazi sympathizers—makes the old quandaries vibrantly new. This sombre-looking but emotionally commanding movie (the Austrian nominee for the best foreign-language-film Oscar), celebrates two real-life figures of very different temperament. The central character is based on Salomon Smolianoff—known in the movie as Salomon Sorowitsch, or Sally (Karl Markovics)—the most talented counterfeiter in prewar Berlin, and also a bon vivant, ladies’ man, cynic, and opportunist; in brief, a happy criminal. In the film, Sally, a Russian-born Jew, is arrested in 1936 and later sent to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he survives for five years by painting Nazi kitsch—portraits of S.S. families and the like. In 1944, he’s transferred to another camp, Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, and placed at the head of Operation Bernhard—a counterfeiting workshop run by the S.S. and staffed by Jewish prisoners skilled as printers and graphic artists. The Nazi plan is to produce enormous amounts of authentic-looking British and American currency, dump it on the market, and undermine the economies of those countries. Sally’s unit produces the British pound in bulk, but his perfect design for the dollar is sabotaged by a Communist printer in the group, Adolf Burger (August Diehl), a fiery anti-Nazi who can’t bring himself to help the German war effort. In Sally’s eyes, Burger’s morality is impeccable, but the noble printer could get them all killed. “The Counterfeiters” is devoted to Sally’s gift for survival—his way of using his wits to keep the group together and to prevent Burger from attaining the martyrdom he appears to long for. The movie is based on a book by Burger, who, more than sixty years later, is still alive. But there’s little doubt who the true hero of the story is.

Shooting the film at the rebuilt Babelsberg studio, just outside Berlin, Ruzowitzky re-created the forgers’ special quarters in Sachsenhausen—a privileged playpen where the inmates are fed and housed decently and given a Ping-Pong table for “pleasure.” The director assumes that we don’t need to see what else went on in the camp. Perhaps thirty thousand people died there, and sounds of the camp’s normal activities eerily break through the walls of the forgers’ compound. In all, the situation of the counterfeiters is similar to that of the British prisoners building a bridge for the Japanese in “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” They get to practice their craft, which keeps their morale up and even provides them with a little joy. Yet some of them are also sick with shame—the clothes they are given to wear by the S.S. have been taken from the dead. Ruzowitzky’s cinematographer, Benedict Neuenfels, shot the movie largely with a handheld camera, and always from the point of view of the forgers, who live and flourish only at the sufferance of the S.S. An officer named Herzog (Devid Striesow), a Nazi of ambiguous intentions—he’s a protector and a potential executioner—treats Sally as both a genius and a worm, and Sally, silent, furtive, and willing to accept humiliation, plays at servility. As the movie tells it, it’s precisely Sally’s faking and his criminal abilities that work for him in the camp. Karl Markovics has a narrow hatchet face—aggressive but guarded—and a glint in his eye. The movie keeps us close to him, and we learn, with increasing admiration, how his mind works. “The Counterfeiters” is a testament to guile. Ruzowitzky scored the picture with tangos, and the tangos are meant to be Sally’s music—seductive, insolent, triumphant.

Ryan Reynolds, the mild-eyed TV actor, is perhaps too recessive for starring roles in the movies. In the new romantic comedy “Definitely, Maybe,” he plays a young man who can’t decide which of three women he wants. His character, Will Hayes, is meant to be a little lost, but the performance itself is tentative and physically inert; it’s as if Reynolds thought that any display of sexual swagger would turn Will into a cad—a misconception that almost any old movie star could have argued him out of. Yet “Definitely, Maybe,” which was written and directed by Adam Brooks, has charm and spirit. The movie is set in Manhattan during Bill Clinton’s first Presidential campaign and the years afterward, a period in which Will’s ambitions and romantic mishaps are plotted against the President’s troubles with women and the disillusion that overtook the later Clinton period. At the request of his smart little daughter, Maya (Abigail Breslin), Will recounts his love life, though he changes the names, so that Maya can’t tell which of his three girlfriends will turn out to be her mother. For us, the best part of the tale is not finding out which woman he marries; the interest lies in the women themselves. Elizabeth Banks, a slender, cheerful blonde, plays a Midwesterner with a sense of honor so highly developed that she argues herself out of happiness; Isla Fisher, short, with thick auburn hair, is a changeable free spirit who keeps Will—and maybe herself—off balance; and Rachel Weisz, in her strongest movie work to date, is shrewd, flirtatious, and stunningly untrustworthy as an ambitious journalist. In serious roles, Weisz can be stiff-backed and righteous, but here, doing comedy, she appears to be a major actress eager to reveal everything she’s been holding inside. ♦

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